Current Affairs

04/29/2010

Right now there's a lot of hand-wringing
going on in the world of publishing. Lots of keening and tearing out
hair and all those other things that real people don't actually do,
but that we use to indicate anxiety. Folks are worried. And because
everyone's worried, well, picture book creators feel that they might
as well be, too.

Well, take heart, picture book author/illustrator! It already hit the fan quite a few years ago!
I could be wrong, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that it won't
get much worse. Not many authors and illustrators
were ever going to retire on their earnings anyway. Let's face it, you don't go into this business for the big bucks.

If anything—heavy, heavy caveats
here—this is a moment of opportunity for the medium. I know
everyone and his brother is extolling the delights of the ipad, but
in truth it's really opened things up for this format—the traditional costs of which can make producing one prohibitively
expensive. Page counts are currently dictated by the
standard sizes of signatures and the costs of printing the art work, among other things. We now may be looking at a
market that can welcome a whole range of sizes in books. Don't get me wrong, I love these books as objects, too. I will always have a fondness for the nice, succinct 32-pager. And I love to imagine the paper weight and the kinds of inks and lamination that I will use on my books. But I think the new digital opportunities are very exciting, and I like to think that it may make some projects possible that might not have had a shot in the traditional format.

But even if this conjecture is wrong,
time marches on, things change. Gnashing your teeth and cracking your
knuckles is not going to help (as good as it may feel). Just do what
feels right. Make what you are inclined to make. There's nothing so
stifling as thinking about cash/wrap when you're trying to create your
masterpiece.